Page 1 of Of Sockets Of Stitches
Chapter One
The luxury of time.
The creature circled at night, as far as I could tell. In this place of haze and numbness of body and sense, time had become a quaint memory. Perhaps the creature circled in the day. Perhaps twice a night.
I could not properly tell.
I had assumed thoughts and power would be my only company here, but I could sense this creature—whatever he was—in fullness. No other sound reached my ears but his growl and snarl and snap. No other smell nor taste nor sight had otherwise touched me during my time here, though I imagined that if the creature attacked tonight, then I might feel the drip of his saliva and smell the rot of his breath in my final moments.
Robbed of senses. Starved of bodily reassurance. That was the haze for a queen.
And the reason?
I simply did not care for the reasonat this time.
Time.
Since stitch and patch and immortality first came upon me, I had not known the luxury of time.Turn princes to pawns. Lure princesses to become champions of my queendom. Conquer kings. Stitch fifty mothers together. Enter the haze or the world will face The Real End.
Rush here. Rush there. Such completeness in the frenzy.
Immortals had no luxury in time. And how ironic, how unexpected that discovery had been. Yet here…Here.
Here, a queen could not be sure of night and day and the circling routine of a creature. She could only sit—though in numbness, she could not be sure of her sitting position, either—and becircled as she wondered whether saliva and rotting breath would meet her senses now or later.
A queen could not await that fate.
Yet a queen could not resist that fate.
“Monsters need me?” I asked the thick haze. Though if my lips moved, I could not feel them. If my voice sounded, then I could not hear it. Total bodily numbness would not allow for that.
Filled with determination to remain queen and to guard the wellness of all monsters, I had marched into the fog. The savage betrayal of King See had ignited my courage to do so. I had marched and marched, and then slowed somewhat, then somewhat more. The numbness of my body had not been as all-consuming then as it was now, and I had vaguely felt the impact of crashing to the rocky ground. My hands had registered the scratch of stone and compacted, cracked dirt as I had crawled up a shallow mound. The backs of my legs had felt the tiniest pressure that had informed me of sitting there.
But did I still sit? A queen could not say, because shortly after sitting, she had lost all knowledge of body.
Only awareness of mind and power had remained.
I had since tried to convince myself that the only reason Ientered the fog was to cling to queendom and guard the wellness of monsters. I might have convinced myself of this, too, and yet my mother’s gaunt face lingered in memory—the fear in her eyes.
In all of these quiet moments—too many quiet moments—my mind would stretch back to the past and retrace my steps to where fifty mothers were stitched around my tower. I would look across their circle and straight into my mother’s eyes where she sat beside her grave of hellebores.
In her eyes I saw her fear again, and her fear would not let me deny. She had feared I would not return because she had guessed that I did notwantto return.
King See had broken my heart as he had always said he would. He had offered the role of princess to me, which he had wished for from the start.
King See had betrayed me as I stood battling the poison of a deadly curse, in chase of another king who had escaped me—King Change, who now wandered in the haze, like me. Was he maddened too? Did we unknowingly sit five feet from each other?
I took a breath. In my mind, at least.
No, my mother’s fear-filled eyes would not allow me to deny.
In this haze I had sought an escape from heart’s agony, or a distraction from its iron grip. I had sought to equal and override my pain in this terrible and frightening place. I had sought to… punish myself. No, perhaps not that, but I had desperately yearned to erase the hurt of my soul immediately and in whatever way possible, whether in love or hate of myself. Perhaps that was punishment.
Loving him was what I had sought to outrun in this fog. I had achieved the opposite, for I could think of nothing but the thoughts that I had thought to outrun.
I could think only of the mistake of loving King See; of my shame in letting him drive me toward self-punishment and suchtorment in heart; of the naivety of granting him that power over my wellness and fate and queendom.
Broken dreams.
